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The FBI has lost crucial text messages sent by its employees, which could have shed light on alleged anti-Donald Trump bias within the agency, an in particular over the so-called Trump-Russia investigation.

The text messages show that former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch knew well in advance of FBI Director James Comey’s 2016 press conference, that he would recommend against charging Hillary Clinton, but it appears that these “smoking gun” text messages have now conveniently been lost by the FBI…or have they…

Investigators “may be able to recover deleted text messages from the cellphones used by the parties,” agreed Dennis Williams, a ‎partner at ‎Pathway Forensics LLC who worked three decades with the FBI, including as director of the Greater Houston Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory.

“If the users were using the Google cloud as a backup, messages could be found there. If the phone had been synced with the FBI desktop computer, or even a home computer, the messages could also be located on those devices. If the old phones are available, forensic exams of those phones could also recover the messages,” Vilfer said. “The particular FBI employees of interest in this case had texted that they would be using an alternative messaging system, iMessage. This is on the Apple platform and would come with similar sources of possible backups—iCloud, their personal iPhone or Macs etc. I suspect that is where some real meat might be as it relates to their discussions.”